The Hughes Brothers' From Hell Is an Intriguingly, Sometimes Infuriatingly Original Film

Directed by the Hughes Brothers

Now is probably not the right time for a serious popular horror film entitled From Hell. But I'm not sure what time would have been right for a dreamy slasher melodrama about the hunt for Jack the Ripper in the 1890s Whitechapel district of London. The fourth feature film by twin brothers Albert and Allen Hughes, From Hell takes them a century and a continent away from their typical subject matter?African-American poverty and crime.

In some ways, it's their most obvious grab at popular success, with a Hollywood budget, big stars (Johnny Depp as a police inspector, Heather Graham as a streetwalker) and the most lavish production values this side of a Batman movie. Oscar-winning production designer Martin Childs created the massive Whitechapel set on a soundstage outside Prague; the sooty Cinemascope photography is by Peter Deming, the wizard behind Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Evil Dead 2. The source is a 1999 graphic novel by Alan Moore and illustrator Eddie Campbell that retold the tale of Jack the Ripper?who was never caught, and whose motives remain unexplained?as a conspiracy epic about class warfare and economic deprivation. Like Silence of the Lambs, Seven and Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear, the Hughes brothers want to fuse art-house atmospherics and film-school self-consciousness with the formulaic, bowel-rattling shocks Lecter-heads have been conditioned to expect.

But in other ways?the ways that really matter?From Hell is an intriguingly, sometimes infuriatingly original film that expands on the filmmakers' interests and widens their horizons. It's more than a serial killer story in period drag. In its own slickly ambitious way, it has valid things to tell us about violence, politics and money?topics most Hollywood films rarely address with any degree of commitment. Depp's character, Inspector Fred Abberline, is a London police inspector of predictably unorthodox means. A drug addict who's first seen in an opium den, Abberline is one of those Manhunter-style sleuths who catches his prey by thinking like them; he hallucinates, or perhaps receives, mysterious first-person visions. Prostitutes are being disemboweled in Whitechapel, and while the murder of streetwalkers is nothing new, this killer's methods are unlike anything Abberline and his partner, Peter Godley (Robbie Coltrane), have seen.

The detectives have to solve the case without much help from anyone else. The whole police force appears to be corrupt (when Godley barges into the opium den at the start of the picture to find Abberline, the Chinese proprietor tells Godley, "We already paid!"). The detectives' efforts are continually being hindered by coolly smug superiors and obstructed by suspects higher-up on the social food chain. Even the people of Whitechapel are reluctant to help, because they've long accepted the district's sordidness and brutality as the natural state of things.

Abberline is a widower whose wife died in childbirth; his attempts to numb his pain with drugs (opium, poison-spiked absinthe) have made him a social outcast within the police department, a scuzzy artist-in-residence whose intuitive powers are respected even though his appearance and antiestablishment values are condemned. He and his staunch ally Godley make a terrific team?a blood-soaked Holmes and Watson. Depp's brooding, tenderhearted, super-intelligent cop might be the more gifted twin brother of the hapless character he played in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow; Coltrane is a perfect counterweight, delivering the no-nonsense empathy and cynical humor that has become the actor's specialty.

Other equally compelling characters float in and out of the narrative: Ben Kidney (Terence Harvey), a ruthless street cop who steals from pimps and intimidates their women; Sir Charles Warren (Ian Richardson), a stiff-upper-lip superior in the department who sees that Abberline is going after important people and is determined to put a stop to it; and Sir William Gull (Ian Holm), an ex-surgeon who suspects the detectives are right to cast their accusatory gaze upward rather than down.

"One thing's for sure," Warren warns Abberline, "an Englishman didn't do it."

He suggests the detective look among the Chinese and the Jews, since they're responsible for all the evils of English society anyway. Unlike any other Ripper film I can think of, From Hell treats the streetwalkers not as cannon fodder, but as people?poor, oppressed women trying to earn a living under rotten circumstances. Heather Graham's character, a steely, sensible redhead named Mary Kelly, realizes the miserable nature of her life but still dreams of escaping it one day to become a wife and mother. The whores sleep together in pathetically tiny rented rooms and, in one instance, strapped side by side on a rented bench. Women like this can be lured rather easily by the Ripper, who understands that their profession is the result of poverty and sexism, not personal morality. He waves a bunch of exotic grapes their way, and they climb right into his carriage. "England doesn't have whores," Mary tells Abberline. "Just a great mass of very unlucky women."

Working with a script credited to two fine scriptwriters, Terry Hayes (Flirting, the Mad Max trilogy) and Rafael Yglesias (Fearless), the Hughes brothers have come up with a thriller that seems very different from their previous three features?Menace II Society, Dead Presidents, American Pimp?but really isn't. Whatever else one may say about the Hughes brothers?they're too slick; they're too obsessed with blaxploitation and Scorsese movies; they're too cynical; they're drawn to stereotypes?they have a clearly defined, valuable and rarely explored central theme: poverty breeds crime.

As an historical variation on the serial killer genre, From Hell works up to a point, spending its first hour delivering the predictable (sometimes repulsive) goods the genre seems to require: diabolical, wraithlike villains; obsessive, intuitive detective-philosophers; freakish tabloid violence; women in distress. There's even the obligatory scene where the hero's superiors kick him off the case and make him clean out his office. Graham's accent is barely competent, and while the violence is generally more restrained than the filmmakers' fans might expect, there are a few nasty closeups that just weren't necessary.

And yet, despite its surface slickness and baldfaced artistic pretensions, this is an angry, empathetic movie. It's genuinely interested in the lives of the poor, and righteously angry at the rich ruling class that has used the poor as servants, whores, entertainers and guard dogs since civilization began. The second half spirals into a bizarre conspiracy that turns history into a slanderous comic book, then delivers an intelligent, downbeat, provocative ending that's sure to alienate most viewers, and finishes up by reminding us that nothing we just saw can be taken at face value because it's all the memory of an absinthe-pickled opium addict. (The film literally begins and ends inside clouds of opium smoke: think McCabe & Mr. Ripper.)

From Hell only pretends to be a slasher picture; it's actually a panoramic social drama. Every layer of London society is represented?the poor, the working class, the middle class, the rich and the royal. Best of all, while it views the Ripper's mayhem with an appropriate mix of lurid fascination and terror, it's careful to remind itself (and us) that the murders didn't erase anybody's innocence, because nobody in 1880s London had any, especially in Whitechapel. The Ripper murders confirmed people's worst fears about city life, then upped the ante and gave them entirely new reasons to be scared?20th-century reasons. Gull explains why the Ripper was different. "The butchery is random," he says, describing the killer's handiwork, "yet meticulous, methodical?an altogether different breed of killer." He kills not for self-preservation or dominance, but out of an egomaniacal desire to write his own demons on a public wall in blood, inflicting so much fear on the populace that they can think of nothing but him.

From Hell presents the Ripper not merely as the predecessor of Son of Sam and Charles Manson, but as the opening act in a new age of ritualized, narcissistic, expressive brands of slaughter: Hitler, Pol Pot, bin Laden. (A chilling closeup near the end of the movie shows a chalk-scrawled slur against "Juwes" being erased from a Whitechapel wall by a policeman's hand?literally wiped from existence.) The film insists that mass killers aren't mysterious incarnations of unfathomable evil; they're representatives of their society's viciously self-interested side, a side that's often kept hidden. The thesis gets at something crucial in modern public life. Any politician who murders large numbers of people for personal rather than policy reasons (Hitler as opposed to Nixon) does so because his actions are permitted, even encouraged, by millions of strangers?faceless spectators who see the murderer as their representative, their fantasy figure, their champion. That's Jack the Ripper in From Hell. The Hugheses and their screenwriters imply, a la Oliver Stone, that there were a good many people in London, at all levels of society, with a vested interest in allowing the Ripper to keep killing.

In its way, From Hell is a subversive movie. A spectacular, David Lynch-inspired crane shot midway through the movie begins with a high-angle view of 1888 London, looking like a smoke-choked fever dream of Dickens, then descends beneath street level, into the dark, depopulated guts of the city. The shot expresses the movie's reason for being: From Hell dips beneath the surface of the impoverished popular imagination, taking us deeper into human impulses, deeper into history, deeper into fear. In an age of televised mass slaughter, that might be deeper than some viewers are willing to go.